


Pinpricks of Light Pollution

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:51:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1771408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The naivety is lost and we are stronger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pinpricks of Light Pollution

Your gaze remains fixed on the predictably turbulent horizon but I close my eyes and I picture it. I picture The Before.

I'm standing like a proud animal, like a dead one frozen in a deceptive stance of courage. The sky is so grey but I tell myself there'll be colour soon, vibrant and potent with language that nobody's ever bothered to write down. I think it should be snowing but there's a dark matter where the sea once was and it's so dark, so dark and hollow I can taste it moving, so dangerous and unknowable, so inviting. I could try to walk closer to it but it would just move further away. 

So I look down at my feet instead but it's so cold my neck barely moves and it hurts to blink. My blood is transient between the islands of ice and steam, but I've taught myself to ignore it. Below my feet, above my head, everyone who has ever existed exists in tandem this second, I can hear them talking and being but I can't hear their heartbeats and all I can see is frozen, dead grass. I am standing on the pinnacle of my life, this burning air both sustains and murders me. 

The wind draws caresses across my skin like a lover might, like a killer might. They're all the same. All my cells surge to greet her touch and my teeth burn away in my skull. This is what the night feels like or the spaces when you're not thinking about breathing. This is what somebody else's tongue feels like pressed against flesh, this is how the stars taste. I am in my own domain. I created it out of torn paper and discarded cups of half finished tea. I need no one to have dominion over, I need no one to have dominion over me. 

We're all born from wit and courage and we all think we're worth that extra five minutes, we all think we're worth someone else's breath and words and tears but (and from this wide hill I can see it more clearly than anywhere else) we're all just pinpricks of light desperate to pierce the vastness of The Outside and we all just merge into one lonely beam when you're far enough away. I need no one here. I cast no light at all. 

No one knows I'm here, they think I don't think, they think my sky is riddled with bitter serpents and buckets with no handles that remain for no reason at all. They think my hands are coated in a layer of frost. It's true, of course, it's all true but I pretend it isn't as I walk towards the no-longer-sea that rolls with phantom waves. 

And then you came, do you remember? I don't even think you noticed the chill that winds it's way beneath the skin, settles itself so imposingly that you can do nothing but keep moving backwards until you think it's left you. You weren't there, then you were there; I didn't notice the change at the time but in retrospect the sky hanging above us both burst into the vibrancy of an oil painting that fell clumsily off the end of a paintbrush. You burned the stars into my heart and you set the snow on fire. 

The sea returned to where it belongs but we can't see it. I'm too lost in the roaring of your eyes to care. 

I was once alone on this wide, wide hill and I thought I could never be more alive but now you're standing beside me with your left hand slipped into my right back pocket and we're both laughing at how stubbornly, preposterously ignorant I once was.


End file.
